Quick Orientation

Loved by Martina Lauchengco is a foundational guide to product marketing in the tech industry. Lauchengco, drawing on decades of experience at companies like Microsoft, Netscape, and in venture capital, argues that effective product marketing is not just about collateral or launches, but about driving product adoption by strategically shaping market perception. The book outlines the four core fundamentals of the role and provides practical frameworks and examples for individuals and leaders to excel at product marketing, ultimately making tech products loved by their markets. It’s essential reading for anyone involved in bringing technology products to market, regardless of their specific title.

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Chapter 1: When David Beats Goliath

This chapter introduces the core argument: strong product marketing is essential for success, even for great products, and it can help smaller players overcome established competitors.

The Pocket vs. Instapaper Story

Loved opens with the compelling tale of how Pocket (formerly Read It Later) surpassed Instapaper, despite Instapaper’s founder having more industry buzz.

Initial Instinct: Pocket’s founder first focused on building a better product with more features than Instapaper.
Product Marketing Shift: They realized they needed to focus equally on the market side of the equation.
Key Actions: They shared data on changing consumer behavior (like mobile video consumption), connected their product’s purpose to broader trends (“anytime, anywhere”), rebranded from “Read It Later” to “Pocket” to reflect a wider scope (saving videos, images), made the app free, and shared the “why” behind new features with influencers before launch.
Outcome: This strategic market focus allowed Pocket to define the category, gain significant traction, and ultimately surpass Instapaper in users and market perception.

What Is Product Marketing?

Lauchengco defines product marketing by its purpose, not just its tasks.

Core Purpose: To drive product adoption by shaping market perception through strategic marketing activities that meet business goals.
Beyond Tasks: It’s more than creating collateral, sales enablement, or managing launches.
Strategic Intent: It brings strategic intent and product insight to all market-facing activities.
Foundational Work: It provides the base layer for all other marketing and sales efforts.

Why Product Marketing Matters Now

The contemporary tech landscape makes strong product marketing more critical than ever.

Crowded Market: Modern tools and methods mean product landscapes are rapidly expanding with countless competitors.
Feature Noise: Many products make similar claims and have similar features, making it hard to stand out based on product alone.
Decision Difficulty: The vast information landscape makes it difficult for potential customers to navigate and make decisions.
Need for Coordination: Success requires a carefully coordinated go-to-market engine and a clear market position.

Where Product Marketing Fits

Product marketing bridges the gap between the product organization and the broader go-to-market functions like marketing and sales.

Customer Journey: Marketing focuses on reaching customers on their journey, while sales focuses on converting prospects.
Specialized Marketing: Modern marketing teams are highly specialized (demand gen, social, content, PR, etc.).
Product Marketing’s Role: Product marketers define what aspects of a product to promote, who to target, why target customers care, and which channels are most important, enabling these specialists.

This chapter establishes that product marketing is a strategic function critical for market success, acting as a bridge between product creation and customer adoption in a crowded world.

Chapter 2: The Fundamentals of Product Marketing

This chapter introduces the four core pillars that define the work of product marketing, illustrating them with a story about Microsoft Word.

The Microsoft Word Story

Lauchengco shares a formative experience as a product manager at Microsoft working on Word for Mac, highlighting how a product marketing mindset helped turn a feature-light release into a success.

The Problem: A new Word for Mac version was rushed and focused on feature parity with Windows, resulting in poor performance and the exclusion of beloved Mac-centric features. Users hated it, and even Bill Gates sent a direct email expressing concern.
Learning from Data: The team analyzed user data, discovering that planned enhancements, though few, focused on functions most people used most of the time (like formatting) or features used frequently by a dedicated group but hard to discover (like bulleted lists).
Shifting the Story: Instead of pitching features, product marketers framed the why behind the release, focusing on making common tasks easier based on actual user behavior.
Changing the Pitch: They ditched standard presentations for interactive whiteboarding sessions with press and analysts, demonstrating the data and using a relatable story of an ordinary office worker’s day.
Outcome: This approach led to positive reviews, including a highly influential one from Walt Mossberg, and made the version Word’s most successful at the time, proving the value of strategic market framing.

Fundamental 1. Ambassador: Connect Customer and Market Insights

This fundamental emphasizes the crucial role of product marketing in deeply understanding the market and customer.

Core Responsibility: Product marketing grounds its work in customer and market insights.
Beyond Problems: It’s more than knowing problems; it’s understanding buyer mindsets, the competitive landscape, and the customer journey.
Input: It involves both quantitative and qualitative knowledge, often shared with product and research teams.

Fundamental 2. Strategist: Direct Your Product’s Go-to-Market

Product marketing must define a clear, strategic path for bringing a product to market.

Defining the Plan: This involves creating a go-to-market plan that aligns with business goals and clarifies the why and when for activities, not just the what and how.
Iterative Process: Like product discovery, market go-to-market requires testing assumptions in the market and adapting based on what is learned.
Strategic Mindset: It demands a strategic and learning mindset, where activities are intentional and learnings are applied.

Fundamental 3. Storyteller: Shape How the World Thinks About Your Product

Product marketing is responsible for framing the product’s value and narrative for the market.

Positioning: This is the long-term game, defining the product’s place in customers’ minds and how it differs from alternatives.
Messaging: This is the short-term game, including the key things said to reinforce positioning and build credibility.
Beyond Formulas: Effective storytelling goes beyond simple positioning statement formulas and is grounded in understanding what the audience needs to hear.

Fundamental 4. Evangelist: Enable Others to Tell the Story

This fundamental highlights the importance of enabling others—from sales to customers to influencers—to talk about and advocate for the product.

Scaling Reach: In today’s competitive world, success relies on others talking about the product.
Authenticity: Evangelism works best when it feels authentic.
Enabling: This involves providing the right messages and tools to various groups so they can effectively share the product’s story.

These four fundamentals—Ambassador, Strategist, Storyteller, and Evangelist—form the interconnected core of effective product marketing, guiding all activities from market insight to enabling advocacy.

Chapter 3: Ambassador

This chapter delves deeper into the Ambassador fundamental, emphasizing the need for continuous, nuanced understanding of customers and the market.

Connecting with Customer Insights

Deep customer understanding is paramount for product marketing.

Beyond Data: Julie Herendeen at Dropbox sent her marketing team to visit customers, revealing nuanced insights about their work and emotional motivations that weren’t visible in data alone.
Why it Matters: This direct connection is why connecting customer and market insights is the first fundamental; it grounds all subsequent marketing efforts.
Continuous Learning: Understanding customers and markets is nuanced and layered, requiring ongoing time and effort.

Market Sensing Practices

Product marketing needs systematic practices to stay connected to market realities.

Direct Interaction: Ideally, engage in direct customer interaction weekly.
Open Questions: Develop a standard set of open-ended questions for customers or prospects.
Insight Reflection: Reflect customer insights in discussions with product and go-to-market teams.
Documentation: Write down the most important insights for easy sharing and use.

Understanding the Buyer’s Journey

Market sensing involves understanding the customer’s journey and motivations.

Holistic View: Product marketing provides insight into the buyer’s mindset, competitive influences, and what that means for positioning.
Dynamic Process: Learning the market side of product fit is dynamic and iterative, requiring starting with a hypothesis and adapting based on real-world testing.
Key Questions: Product marketing probes questions like What are they trying to do?, Do they prioritize this problem?, What compels them to act?, and How does the product get discovered and become desired?

Third-Party Insights

Beyond direct interaction, understanding the ecosystem is vital.

Ecosystem Influence: Markets are heavily influenced by third-party data, research, reports, articles, websites, reviews, press, and social media.
Competitive Insights: Third-party sources are valuable for revealing competitive insights and public perception.
Leveraging Resources: Utilize dedicated customer insights, research, or data analytics teams if available.

The Competition’s Role

The competitive landscape significantly shapes market circumstances.

Perception Shaping: Competitors can shape perceptions even without product changes (e.g., adapting sales process, strong point-of-view content).
Strategic Response: While competitors shouldn’t dictate actions, product marketing must exercise judgment on what merits a strategic response, moving ahead of the competition like in chess.
Staying Focused: Product marketing helps the company stay focused on what’s most important for its customers rather than getting overly reactive.

This chapter underscores that being an effective Ambassador means continuous, multifaceted learning about the customer, market, and competition, and then using those insights to inform product go-to-market strategies.

Chapter 4: Strategist

This chapter focuses on the Strategist fundamental, detailing how to direct a product’s go-to-market by defining clear marketing strategies.

Pocket’s Strategic Launch

The story of Pocket’s 5.0 launch illustrates how strategic thinking guided successful market activities beyond just product features.

The Problem: After a successful 4.0 launch focusing on product, the team needed to boost interest and compete with other apps.
Defining Strategies: Nate Weiner, Pocket’s CEO, defined marketing strategies: grow a loyal user base, define and lead the category, and leverage partnerships.
Guiding Decisions: These strategies helped the team evaluate ideas for the 5.0 launch, determining that an online launch wasn’t enough.
Pocket Matters Event: They decided on an in-person event for press, partners, and users to tell the broader story of why Pocket mattered in enabling mobile lifestyles and benefiting content creators.
Outcome: The event led to significant press coverage, downloads, and accelerated partner discussions, helping Pocket define its category and elevating its importance—all guided by the initial strategies.

Key Go-to-Market Terms

Lauchengco clarifies essential terms used in go-to-market and strategy discussions.

Go-to-Market (GTM) Engine: The total marketing and sales machinery that brings products to market.
Marketing Strategy: Drives the orchestration of marketing elements in the GTM engine; owned by the marketing team at the company level, and by product marketing for a specific product.
Product Go-to-Market: The unique path for how a particular product goes to market (distinct from broader company GTM).
Distribution Strategy (GTM Model): The chosen model to get products into customers’ hands (direct sales, inside sales, channel partners, direct-to-customer, trial/freemium, product-led growth).
Channel Strategy: Refers to either channel partners (distribution) or the marketing mix (PR, events, social, etc.).
Product Strategy: Connects business objectives and product vision to product team work; elements of this drive a product go-to-market plan.
Business Goals/Objectives: Specific, measurable achievements for a company; product go-to-market strategies align tightly with these.

The Role of Marketing Strategies in Product Go-to-Market

Marketing strategies provide the crucial why for go-to-market activities.

Guardrails: Strategies prevent activities from going off-course and keep them aligned with business goals.
Why and When: They clarify the purpose (why) and timing (when) of activities, which is essential for effective execution.
Iterative Process: Like product discovery, market go-to-market can only be discovered by trying things, making defining strategies an iterative process requiring a strategic and learning mindset.
Key Questions: Thinking through strategies involves questions about third-party validation, customer acquisition speed, customer location, product strengths, market trends, existing relationships, and preferred adoption methods.
Common Themes: Strategy building blocks often fall into themes like enabling growth, improving conversion, generating awareness, defining categories, engendering evangelism, or finding new segments/partners.

How Company Maturity Evolves Product Go-to-Market

The practice of directing go-to-market shifts as a company matures.

Startup: Product and company GTM are synonymous; focus is on rapid discovery and iteration; product marketing is crucial early hire.
Mature Company: GTM machinery is established and complex; focus is on internal coordination and accelerating adoption; product GTM strategies might be similar, but executed by the broader GTM engine; product marketing aligns efforts across functions.

This chapter highlights that strategic direction, defining the why and when for market activities, is a core responsibility of product marketing and is essential for effective execution and achieving business goals.

Chapter 5: Storyteller

This chapter focuses on the Storyteller fundamental, emphasizing that product marketing must shape how the world thinks about the product through positioning and messaging.

Positioning and Messaging Basics

Product marketing is responsible for framing the product’s value for the market.

Positioning: The long-term goal, defining the product’s place in customers’ minds and differentiating it from alternatives.
Messaging: The short-term actions, including key statements to reinforce positioning and build credibility.
Outcome of Actions: Positioning is the collective outcome of all go-to-market activities over time, not just a positioning statement formula.

Use Formulas as Input, Not Output

Positioning statement formulas can be a starting point but shouldn’t dictate final messaging.

Formula Limitations: Formulas often lead to derivative, dense, and jargon-filled messaging that focuses on what companies want to say, not what customers need to hear.
Looker vs. RJMetrics: Comparing Looker and RJMetrics messaging shows that Looker’s more specific, concrete language, though longer, was more effective for its audience of data analysts because it highlighted unique differentiators.
Testing: Messaging should be tested beyond documents, in the actual contexts customers will experience it.

A Better Process

Effective messaging development requires a process beyond just drafting documents.

Collaboration: Good messaging is honed through collaboration across multiple teams (product, sales, marketing).
Iterative Testing: Messaging should be tested iteratively in various contexts (web, email, ads, sales calls).
CAST Guidelines: Use the CAST framework—Clear, Authentic, Simple, Tested—to check if messaging is grounded in customer needs and resonates effectively.
Authenticity over Promotion: Messaging should feel genuinely helpful and authentic, not overly promotional.

The Tendency to Be Overly Precise

Technical products often face the challenge of balancing technical accuracy with clarity for a wider audience.

Technical Enough: Messaging needs to be concrete enough for the technically savvy but doesn’t need to be technically precise at all times.
Connection First: The job of messaging is to create a connection and build understanding before diving into all the technical details.
Leverage Other Assets: Messaging works best when complemented by product trials, videos, or customer testimonials, which can provide deeper context.

Positioning = Your Actions + Others’

Positioning is influenced by both company actions and external factors.

Internal Actions: Every marketing action, from proof-of-concept criteria to product demos and press releases, can reinforce positioning.
External Influence: A significant portion of decision-making happens outside the company’s direct control through reviews, social media, forums, and word-of-mouth (“dark funnel”).
De Facto Positioning: Pay attention to what people are saying about the product, as this can become the de facto positioning, even if official messaging says something else.

This chapter emphasizes that being a successful Storyteller involves deliberate positioning and crafting messaging that is clear, authentic, simple, and tested, grounded in customer understanding, and reinforced by all go-to-market activities.

Chapter 6: Evangelist

This chapter explores the Evangelist fundamental, highlighting the importance of enabling others to tell the product’s story to scale go-to-market efforts.

The Power of Organic Evangelism

Enabling others to advocate for the product is a powerful way to scale reach and build credibility.

Quizlet Example: Quizlet achieved massive growth for years without paid marketing because teachers and students genuinely loved the product and shared their positive experiences organically, creating influential word-of-mouth.
Beyond Company Channels: The impact of others telling the story extends far beyond what official company marketing channels can achieve.
Definition: Evangelism in this context means the systematic enabling of influence through others, including traditional amplifiers and specialists in the GTM engine.

Enabling Others

Product marketing identifies key influencers and provides them with what they need to effectively advocate for the product.

Prioritization: Some evangelists matter more than others; for companies with direct sales, the sales team is a top priority, but external influencers like analysts and app store editors are also crucial.
Word Example: Word’s product marketing team enabled evangelism by creating detailed evaluation guides, meeting with pundits, providing in-depth sales training, and activating beta users for testimonials.
Modern Context: In the era of frequent releases and various GTM models (like product-led growth), the scope of enabling evangelism has expanded to include users themselves.
Authenticity: Providing tools and training should help advocates sound genuine, not like they’re hard-selling.

Evangelism vs. Promotion

It’s crucial to enable others to talk about the product in their own words, rather than just cranking out promotional content.

Shift in Focus: Instead of overly focusing on the product itself, prioritize making it compelling, credible, and desirable for others to talk about.
Empowering Stories: Provide stories (e.g., what customers have done with the product) rather than just feature highlights or sales decks.
Learning: People engage in discussions to learn, not to be lectured or sold to.
Collective Intelligence: Leveraging the collective intelligence of the entire go-to-market engine is key to identifying the best marketing channels for evangelism.

Tailor Evangelism Tools to Your Product’s GTM

What enables evangelism depends on the audience and context.

Sales: Needs playbooks, tools, and training to sound like genuine advocates, and materials to help their internal champions sell the product internally.
Prospective Customers: May seek information from communities or forums to understand transitions and challenges.
Existing Customers: May be activated as evangelists if recognized for their achievements with the product (e.g., at events or through testimonials).
Pundits/Analysts: Need information aligned with their cadences and reporting schedules.
Reducing Friction: Effective evangelism is about reducing friction for people to access information that helps them assess and advocate for the product.

Evangelism Is a Team Sport

While product marketing is the catalyst, enabling evangelism requires collaboration across product and go-to-market teams.

Shared Foundation: This work builds on the foundation of customer insights, strategies, and positioning developed in the other three fundamentals.

This chapter establishes that enabling evangelism, getting others to share the product’s story authentically, is a vital responsibility of product marketing and essential for scaling market reach effectively.

Chapter 7: Strong Product Marketing

This chapter identifies the key skills and responsibilities of effective product marketers, using a startup story to illustrate their impact.

The StartX Story

Lauchengco recounts the experience of StartX, a startup whose technical team struggled with sales despite having a validated idea, highlighting the need for product marketing expertise.

Initial Misstep: The CEO hired sales representatives assuming that’s all was needed to sell, but sales stalled because the product addressed a low-priority problem for executives.
Product Pivot: The team pivoted to solve a high-priority problem with minimal engineering effort, creating a game-changing product for an existing, mature category.
Sales Still Struggled: Even with a better product, sales still struggled because they lacked clear, repeatable messaging and couldn’t identify the most likely buyers.
Hiring a Product Marketer: Hiring a director of product marketing, Josie, was a turning point.
Josie’s Impact: She immediately addressed the lack of clear messaging and target customer definition. She created a white paper that attracted analyst interest, developed consistent product collateral, partnered effectively with product and sales, refined the target customer list, and established a product go-to-market strategy.
Outcome: Product marketing enabled the sales team to succeed, leading to key customer wins and securing the next round of funding. This story demonstrates that product marketing is crucial for diagnosing and addressing market challenges, even when the product is strong.

Key Skills of Strong Product Marketers

Effective product marketers possess a specific blend of skills that overlap with, but are distinct from, product management.

Customer Curiosity & Listening: Deep desire to understand customers and ability to actively listen to their needs and frustrations.
Product Curiosity & Technical Competence: Genuine interest in the product and the capacity to understand how the technology is used and works.
Strategic & Execution Focused: Ability to define clear strategies and execute them effectively to achieve results, always seeing the bigger picture.
Collaborative: Strong ability to work productively with product, marketing, and sales teams, collecting and sharing knowledge across functions.
Communication Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication, including the ability to simplify complex information and communicate authentically.
Broad Marketing Knowledge: Enough understanding of various marketing specialties to guide activities and discuss what’s effective with marketing partners.
Business Savvy: Understanding business goals, different growth models, and recognizing when existing strategies aren’t working.

Key Responsibilities

Product marketers are responsible for a range of activities, often requiring collaboration with other teams.

Ambassador: Connecting customer/market insights, segmenting customers, understanding competition, customer journeys, and market trends.
Strategist: Defining product GTM plans, guiding execution, understanding pipeline dynamics, partnering on pricing/packaging, and guiding marketing activities.
Storyteller: Positioning and messaging, framing the narrative, creating product-centric content, and collaborating on marketing/demand gen.
Evangelist: Enabling customer stories, analysts, press, influencers, and enabling sales through playbooks and tools.

PMM in Different GTM Models

The focus of product marketing work varies depending on the company’s go-to-market model.

Growth Marketing: Overlaps with product marketing but often has product resources; PMM focuses on bridging product teams outside growth, enabling positioning, defining GTM, and aligning marketing activities.
Direct-to-Customer (D2C): Focuses on a product-led, digital/mobile approach; PMM work involves hyper-specific customer segmentation, acquisition channel experimentation, enabling product engagement, and understanding funnel behaviors.
Business-to-Business (B2B): Focuses on converting companies; PMM work involves understanding user/buyer/influencer roles, creating sales tools, understanding nurture processes, defining customer qualification criteria, and guiding marketing activities for sales targets.

Product Marketing Anti-Patterns

Common pitfalls that hinder product marketing’s effectiveness.

Style over Substance: Product looks professional but customers/sales don’t understand what it does or where it fits.
Stuck in Technical Weeds: Focus on technical accuracy leads to messaging that doesn’t clearly articulate value or differentiation.
Functioning Like a Service: Prioritizing sales/marketing requests over strategic customer needs.
Insufficient Resource: Under-resourcing product marketing leads to reliance on other teams (like product management) for core PMM work.

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the skills, responsibilities, and common structures of product marketing, emphasizing the need for strategic thinking and a strong understanding of market dynamics to avoid common pitfalls.

Chapter 8: How to Partner with Product Management

This chapter focuses on the crucial partnership between product marketing (PMM) and product management (PM), highlighting best practices for effective collaboration.

The Word for Mac Partnership

Lauchengco uses her experience on the Word for Mac team to illustrate an exceptional PM-PMM partnership.

Dynamic Duo: She and her PM counterpart, Jeff Vierling, worked closely, understanding customers and markets together, and translating insights into both product development and go-to-market strategy.
Shared Goal: Both roles shared the ultimate goal of creating a product people loved and bought.
Complementary Skills: PMs focus on the product side (valuable, usable, feasible), while PMMs focus on the market side (marketable, adoptable, go-to-market strategy).
Triangulating Fit: The partnership is key to triangulating product/market fit, with the PMM focusing on market dynamics and the PM on product solutions.

Beyond the Core Product Team

Effective collaboration extends beyond the core product team.

Embedded PMM: The partnership works best when PMMs are embedded with product teams, acting as designated marketing strategists for a product squad.
Different Skills: Market strategizing and product building are distinct but complementary skills, requiring both roles to work together.
Translating Learning: PMM translates market learning into implications for marketing channels, distribution, pricing, packaging, timing, positioning, and competitive responses.
GTM Pre-work: PMM also leads tactical go-to-market pre-work, like assessing sales capacity and ensuring incentives and pricing are in place.
Marketability: PMM is the team’s partner in understanding if features or functions are marketable.

Indicators the Partnership Is Working Well

Signs that the PM-PMM collaboration is effective.

Shared Understanding: The why behind the product go-to-market is clearly understood and aligns with the product vision.
PMM Involvement: Product squads actively involve PMM in major product decisions to understand market implications.
Messaging Collaboration: PMs and PMMs collaborate closely on positioning and messaging, ensuring technical accuracy and strategic alignment.
Analyst Engagement: PMs are highly engaged in analyst relations, often facilitated by PMM.
Rapid Response: Competitive response is rapid, collaborative, and coordinated across teams.
Clear Ownership: Pricing and packaging ownership is clear, and packaging effectively serves customer segments and business goals.
PMM Efficiency: PMs feel confident offloading collateral creation and sales enablement to PMM with minimal consultation.

Set It Up for Success

Structuring the organization and defining processes can foster effective PM-PMM partnerships.

PMM to PM Ratio: There’s no single ideal ratio, but it typically ranges from 1:1 to 1:5, depending on the GTM model, organizational support, and product complexity.
Alignment: Align PMMs to product teams based on how customers experience the product and where the business wants to grow (e.g., by product, product suite, vertical, or customer segment).
Evolution of Focus: PMM focus shifts with company maturity, from startup (synonymous with company GTM) to individual product, product suites, verticals, and customer segments.

PMM/PM Best Practice Touchpoints

Recommended processes for ongoing collaboration.

Ongoing: Understanding market fit (continuous discovery).
Weekly: PMM attends regular product squad meetings.
Bimonthly/Monthly: Regular product planning reviews, discussing market/product discoveries and commitments.
Quarterly: Review product go-to-market plans and funnel metrics, ensuring alignment with product planning.

This chapter emphasizes that the PM-PMM partnership is foundational for product success, requiring clear roles, consistent communication, and processes that integrate market insights into product development and go-to-market planning.

Chapter 9: How to Partner with Marketing

This chapter explores the partnership between product marketing and the broader marketing organization, highlighting how coordinated marketing efforts drive product adoption.

Workiva’s Annual Event

The story of Workiva’s annual event for SEC professionals illustrates the power of coordinated marketing efforts to build brand loyalty and drive market impact.

Beyond Expectations: Workiva’s marketing team created a high-budget, multi-day event that exceeded attendees’ expectations, building unmatched loyalty in a community not typically known for that.
Brand Building: The event focused on providing value (continuing education, networking) and created a positive brand experience beyond the product itself.
Impact: The conference generated positive word-of-mouth, swayed skeptical analysts, and paid for itself annually through customer conversion, demonstrating what marketing teams can achieve.

Using the Right Marketing Mix

Marketing teams bring much of the go-to-market strategy to life using a variety of channels and activities.

Customer Experience: Marketing shapes the customer’s experience across numerous touchpoints (website, email, events, social media).
Brand Experience: The sum of these touchpoints forms the brand experience, which is crucial for differentiation in crowded markets.
Supporting GTM: Marketing activities support various stages of the customer funnel: creating awareness, encouraging consideration, encouraging purchase/renewal, and enhancing brand loyalty.
Strategic Foundation: Product marketing defines the strategic palette (the why and when) for a product’s go-to-market activities, and marketing teams collaborate on the what and how.
Iterative Process: Finding the right marketing mix is iterative and changes over time as products move through the adoption curve.

Indicators the Partnership Is Working Well

Signs of an effective partnership between product marketing and the broader marketing team.

Shared Market Understanding: Marketing teams understand market nuances and customer segmentation.
Clear Messaging Framework: Marketing understands the context of the product’s value and has a strong messaging framework.
Strategic Activities: Marketing understands the why behind recommended activities and explores new ideas beyond past successes.
Brand Alignment: Decisions around product naming and branding are collaborative and aligned with the company’s brand strategy.
Sustainable CAC: The cost to acquire customers is sustainable for the business.
Adaptation: Teams collaborate on adapting marketing in response to market shifts.
GTM Goals Served: Product marketers feel confident that marketing activities are serving the product’s go-to-market goals.

Set It Up for Success

Defining roles, processes, and fostering collaboration can improve the product marketing-marketing partnership.

Ambassador Role: Product marketing acts as the product’s ambassador to the marketing team, ensuring alignment with product strategy.
Broadening the Mix: PMM works with marketing to explore and utilize a variety of marketing activities beyond standard ones.
Agile Marketing: Implementing agile marketing practices, often led by a product marketer, allows for dynamic prioritization and adaptation of marketing work based on market learning.
Shared Reporting: While PMM often reports to marketing, shared reporting structure alone doesn’t guarantee good collaboration; processes are needed.

Anti-Patterns, What Better Looks Like

Common pitfalls in the PMM-marketing partnership and how to address them.

Campaigns Lack Positioning: Campaigns focus on performance metrics but fail to position the product effectively. Better: PMM is involved in campaign planning to ensure strategic alignment and positioning.
Aspirational Disconnect: Marketing promotes a future state that is too far ahead of product reality, eroding credibility. Better: PMM partners in finding the balance between inspiration and believability, testing ideas with customers.
Creativity Without Connection: Marketing pursues ideas that are clever but don’t resonate with the target audience. Better: PMM ensures marketing ideas are tested with customers and grounded in audience needs.

PMM/Marketing Best Practice Touchpoints

Recommended processes for consistent collaboration.

Weekly: Alignment meetings to prioritize workload and discuss campaign learnings (often using agile marketing).
Monthly: Activity reviews to see what’s working and apply learnings to future plans; review funnel metrics.
Quarterly: Revisit product go-to-market plans and funnel metrics, ensuring alignment with product planning and sales results.

This chapter emphasizes that a strong partnership between product marketing and the broader marketing organization is essential for scaling go-to-market efforts, requiring clear roles, defined processes, and a focus on delivering a positive, aligned brand experience for customers.

Chapter 10: How to Partner with Sales

This chapter focuses on the vital partnership between product marketing and sales, highlighting the tools and processes needed to enable sales effectiveness.

The Paper Data Sheet Story

Lauchengco shares an anecdote about a mid-market sales team requesting paper data sheets despite modern digital norms, illustrating a common disconnect in understanding sales needs.

The Request: A sales team badly missing its target asked only for paper data sheets, believing it was the key to getting prospects to follow up.
Marketing’s Doubt: The marketing team questioned whether the problem was the collateral or that sales was targeting the wrong customers.
Lack of Discussion: Instead of a collaborative discussion about the root cause and potential solutions, there was a demand from sales that marketing felt unable to challenge effectively.
PMM’s Role: This highlights the product marketer’s role in bridging this gap—taking sales input and collaborating with marketing to find the best response, and representing sales needs back to the product team.

Balancing Urgent and Important

Sales needs are often urgent (closing deals now), while product marketing’s work is often strategic and takes time to impact results.

Sales Needs: Sales needs clear messaging, tools, and training to drive deals forward, with incentives focused on hitting quarterly numbers.
PMM’s Role: Product marketing shapes product knowledge for the market, creates deep product content and tools (like sales playbooks), and directs marketing specialists to support sales goals.
Natural Tension: A natural tension exists between sales’ desire for speed (“get it done now”) and PMM’s focus on strategic effectiveness (“get it done right”).
Powerful Tools: Reference customers (providing real-life proof) and a comprehensive sales playbook (documenting repeatable success practices) are key tools in this relationship.
Funnel Analysis: PMM works with marketing and sales to analyze funnel metrics (conversion rates, time in stage) to identify where adjustments are needed, prioritizing issues at the bottom of the funnel first.

Key Activities with Sales

Product marketing engages in numerous activities to support sales.

Targeting: Jointly defining ideal customer profiles and target account lists.
Customer Journey: Collaborating on customer journey maps.
Sales Tools: Creating sales presentations, call scripts, email templates, data sheets, and videos.
Product Demos: Developing demos grounded in key product messages.
Competitive Response: Creating competitive battle cards and tools.
Validation: Ensuring customer stories and case studies are usable.
Customer Engagement: Establishing customer advisory boards and identifying key events.
Sales Training: Providing sales training and enablement, and working with sales management on targeting.

Indicators the Partnership Is Working Well

Signs of an effective product marketing-sales partnership.

Knowledge & Targeting: Sales is knowledgeable about the product and targets the correct ideal customer segments.
Playbook Adherence: The sales playbook is being followed.
Healthy Pipeline: There is a healthy flow of prospects through the pipeline, and gaps are addressed collaboratively.
Relevant Materials: Marketing actions and assets are relevant, timely, and compelling, providing sales with effective tools.
Aligned Goals: Product marketers feel their product’s go-to-market goals are well served by marketing and sales actions.

Set It Up for Success

Defining systematic collaboration processes and ensuring shared understanding are key.

Leadership Empowerment: Leaders must empower teams to collaborate as partners, not just make demands.
Systematic Collaboration: PMM needs regular, defined interfaces with sales (e.g., attending pipeline reviews) to stay updated on market realities and adapt responses.
Target Customer Clarity: Clear identification of customer segments with a higher likelihood of success is crucial, especially for startups.
Collaborative Tool Creation: Sales tools and playbooks should be created collaboratively with sales input and testing.
Pricing & Packaging: PMM plays a heavy role in pricing and packaging, ensuring they are easy for sales to explain and align with customer understanding.

Anti-Patterns, What Better Looks Like

Common pitfalls in the PMM-sales partnership and how to address them.

Marketing as Service: Marketing serves sales requests without strategic PMM guidance, focusing only on immediate needs. Better: Use data and GTM goals to drive prioritization of marketing activities.
Lack of Awareness: Insufficient awareness before sales engages makes their job harder. Better: Focus on targeted approaches (like account-based marketing) where marketing aligns with sales efforts.
Lack of Playbook Adherence: Sales takes maverick actions, leading to inconsistent messaging and poor customer fit. Better: Collaborate on playbook creation and ensure sales management holds reps accountable for using playbooks and tools.

PMM/Sales Best Practice Touchpoints

Recommended processes for consistent collaboration.

Weekly/Biweekly: Pipeline and marketing reviews to discuss sales activity, identify gaps, and align marketing responses.
Monthly: Joint funnel analysis to diagnose effectiveness of targeted work and review performance against service level agreements between marketing and sales.
Quarterly: Revisit product go-to-market plans and funnel metrics to ensure alignment with business revenue goals and product priorities.

This chapter concludes that a strong product marketing-sales partnership is essential for success when a direct sales team is involved, requiring clear roles, collaborative processes, and a focus on providing sales with the right tools and information to do their best work.

Chapter 11: Discovering and Rediscovering Market Fit

This chapter emphasizes that achieving product/market fit is an ongoing process that requires continuous discovery and iteration, particularly on the market side.

The Word and the Legal Market

Lauchengco’s experience with Word for Mac in the legal market illustrates that market fit is not a one-time achievement and requires adapting to evolving customer needs.

The Problem: Despite Word’s overall success, it wasn’t the standard in the legal market because it couldn’t handle specific legal formatting needs without workarounds.
Discovery: The product team visited law firms and analyzed documents, learning that fixing the formatting issues required significant product changes.
Adapting GTM: While waiting for product changes, the product marketer for the legal segment adapted the marketing focus to law firms who valued using the broader Microsoft Office suite, leveraging existing strengths.
Outcome: Word eventually became the standard in the legal market, but it took time and a go-to-market approach that responded to the market realities as they were, even when the product wasn’t fully aligned.

The Market Side of Product/Market Fit

Market fit is about discovering “market pull”—what makes a customer need or want a product enough to take action, in a repeatable way.

Beyond Desirability: It goes beyond whether people say they’ll use or buy something; it’s about how they act when faced with real-world conditions (crowded market, competing priorities, budgets, status quo).
Dynamic Process: Determining market fit is a dynamic process that involves taking inputs from discovery work and applying them to real-life purchasing behavior.
PMM’s Role: Product marketing is crucial for applying market nuance to discovery work, identifying marketable customer segments, understanding purchase influences (comparison sites, forums), and synthesizing learning into GTM plans, positioning, and messaging.

Probe Early, Probe Often

Market fit needs to be probed right from the start and continuously throughout a product’s life.

Beyond Product Baselines: While product discovery covers usability, feasibility, and viability, market fit explores what lies underneath perceived value and drives urgency.
Market-Oriented Questions: Probe questions about who is most likely to use/buy/influence, problem prioritization, alternatives considered, compelling aspects, relative urgency, pricing expectations, and recent product purchases.
Simple Market Test Techniques: Use techniques like exit surveys, A/B messaging tests, demand test variations, ad testing, sentiment probes, and usability test variations (including competitor sites and search behavior) to get quick, directional feedback on market perception and behavior.
Creative Testing: Be creative and get out of the building for discovery; real-world testing of ideas can reveal significant insights.

Additional Techniques for Existing Products

For existing products, specific techniques can help reveal if market fit is still present or needs adjustment.

Win/Loss Analysis: Crucial for understanding why customers are won or lost, revealing product, process, perception, or brand issues. PMM is key to driving this and translating learnings into action across teams.
Sales Call Shadowing: Listening to or observing sales calls provides direct insight into the interplay between sales and prospects, revealing important nuances in language and reaction.
Intent Data: Leveraging data from account-based or predictive marketing tools to understand prospective customer behavior, informing market segmentation, messaging, and campaign development.
Social/Customer Sentiment: Paying attention to customer reviews, social media, forums, and employee buzz reveals how people feel about the product and company, influencing reputation and adoption.

Timeboxing and Active Listening

Effective discovery work requires discipline and specific skills.

Timeboxing: Allocate fixed time periods for learning and testing to prevent perfection from becoming the enemy of progress; iterate and execute based on learnings within the time box.
Active Listening: Listen to understand, not to respond or validate assumptions; lead with open-ended questions before introducing product ideas.
Relative Strength: Put enough different ideas in front of customers to gauge the relative strength of their response.

This chapter emphasizes that understanding and continuously probing market fit is a critical, ongoing responsibility, shared across teams but led by product marketing to ensure go-to-market strategies align with real-world customer behavior and market dynamics.

Chapter 12: Product Marketing in the Age of Agile

This chapter addresses the challenges of product and go-to-market alignment in fast-paced, agile development environments and introduces tools and practices to improve coordination.

The Challenges of Agile for GTM

Agile development’s velocity and continuous delivery can create disconnects for go-to-market teams.

Lack of Predictability: Go-to-market teams rely on more predictable cadences for planning, which agile’s rapid releases can disrupt.
Communication Gaps: Lightweight communication (like release notes) might not effectively inform GTM teams about new functionality or its significance.
Marketing Disconnect: GTM teams might not understand why certain features are marketed or feel that significant engineering effort isn’t being reflected in marketing.

Create a Release Scale

A Release Scale is a simple tool to create shared vocabulary and expectations between product and go-to-market teams regarding releases.

Clarifying Definitions: Distinguishes between sprints (development cycles), releases (publicly available functionality), and launches (major, cross-functionally supported releases).
Setting Standards: Defines different levels or types of releases and the corresponding expected go-to-market activities and resources for each.
Lead Time: Clarifies the amount of lead time marketing teams need for different release types.
Collaborative Creation: Developed through collaboration with marketing, customer support, and sales enablement; categorization of releases is debated by all affected parties.
Creation Steps: Define the scale (levels/names), use past releases as examples, identify customer impact, define marketing objectives for each level, define typical resources/promotional vehicles, articulate needed lead times, and consistently use the scale in planning meetings.

Agile Marketing

Agile marketing applies agile principles to marketing practices for a more dynamic approach.

Core Principles: Responding to changes over following a plan, rapid iterations over large campaigns, testing and data over opinions, small experiments over large bets, individuals and interactions over segments, and collaboration over silos.
Marketing Squads: In the highest functioning version, product marketers act like product managers leading cross-functional marketing squads (communications, advertising, digital, etc.) in weekly scrum meetings.
Prioritization: These meetings prioritize workload and discuss learnings from recent activities.
Data-Driven: Provides a forum to discuss what marketing teams should do more or less of based on data and whether outputs are meeting desired outcomes.
Strategic Check: Product marketers ensure activities align with strategies.

This chapter emphasizes the need for intentional processes and tools, like the Release Scale and Agile Marketing practices, to bridge the gap between rapid product development and effective go-to-market execution, ensuring alignment and maximizing impact.

Chapter 13: The Metrics That Matter

This chapter explores how to measure the effectiveness of product marketing, emphasizing that metrics should align with business goals and involve collaboration across functions.

Measuring Product Marketing

Unlike sales, product marketing often lacks clear, immediate metrics for success; its outcomes often take time to realize.

Alignment with Goals: The best way to measure product marketing is by defining expectations up front and tying its results closely to company goals.
No Standard Set: There is no single set of metrics, as goals vary by company situation and stage.

Product Marketing Objectives

Examples of measurable objectives (OKRs) for product marketing.

Category Leadership: Become recognized as a leader by key analysts.
Market Awareness & Adoption: Launch a product to improve awareness and enable adoption in a key new market segment.
Positioning: Position the product as redefining a concept, measured by mentions or category references.
Competitive Win Rate: Enable sales to win a specific percentage of competitive deals.
Organic Evangelism: Grow organic evangelism on key digital/social platforms by a defined percentage.

OKRs and KPIs

Understanding the difference between objectives, key results, and key performance indicators.

OKR: A framework for defining objectives.
Key Result (KR): A specific KPI with a target, measuring progress towards an objective.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI): A metric that measures something important.
Alignment: PMM OKRs must align with product, sales, and marketing teams, sometimes shared across functions.

Metrics for Product Marketing

Key metrics, often shared across teams, viewed through a product marketing lens.

Product Metrics (HEART): PMM brings market/customer learning to improve product engagement or adoption metrics where relevant (e.g., emails to re-engage users during onboarding).
Customer Funnel Metrics: Track engagement and flow between stages; PMM directs tactics (targeted mail, call scripts, training) to improve conversion.
Marketing Metrics (Customer Journey Engagement): PMM examines which content/pages prospects engage with to inform marketing mix adjustments.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): PMM works with marketing to refine target segments and diagnose issues hindering lead growth or predictability; in PLG, Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) may be used.
Inbound Discovery: Organic search/direct search indicates awareness and brand position; PMM uses shifts over time to assess need for awareness/positioning focus.
Sales Metrics (Sales Cycle Time): PMM examines trends and processes for well-qualified customers to identify repeatable practices.
Win Rates: PMM analyzes win/loss rates to identify what’s working/not and directs action across the full PMM stack (training, tools, messaging, pricing, etc.) to improve win rates.
Financial Metrics (Conversion by Product): For multi-product companies, PMM monitors if the product mix aligns with growth goals and directs efforts to accelerate growth where needed.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): PMM examines customer segments, messaging, and marketing mix if CAC is increasing or unsustainable.
Lifetime Customer Value (LTV): PMM examines GTM materials, sales process, price, or packaging if LTV isn’t healthy relative to CAC.
Retention: PMM examines GTM materials, sales process, price, or packaging if retention isn’t at the desired rate, looking for disconnects with customer expectations.

Practice Patience and Persistence

Measuring product marketing effectiveness takes time and requires clarity on expectations.

Clarity on Expectations: PMM does best when it knows how its success will be measured and uses this to respond to market realities.

This chapter emphasizes that effective measurement of product marketing requires aligning metrics with business goals, collaborating across functions, and exercising patience as outcomes often take time to materialize.

Chapter 14: When Strategy Guides Product Go-to-Market

This chapter opens Part Three, focusing on strategy, and illustrates the power of strategic product go-to-market (PGTM) using the example of Salesforce’s B2B Commerce.

Salesforce B2B Commerce Launch

Michelle Jones, Director of Product Marketing for Salesforce’s B2B Commerce, made strategic decisions that went against the obvious to propel the product’s growth.

Strategic Timing: Instead of launching at Dreamforce (Salesforce’s massive annual event) in the fall, she chose the smaller Connections conference earlier in the year because her product’s customers (companies selling goods) were too busy in Q4 (holiday season) to focus on something new.
Earning Internal Support: She strategically positioned the product to earn a spot in a major executive keynote and prepare Salesforce’s large sales team.
Crafting the Story: She created a story marrying market trends with customer benefits, showing how B2B Commerce leveraged the Salesforce platform for business growth (e.g., adding B2C-like buying experiences to B2B transactions).
Customer Validation: She secured three diverse, public customer examples (Ecolab, Univar, L’Oréal) to support the story’s credibility at launch.
Analyst Endorsement: She worked with product and analyst relations to secure early backing from a key Gartner analyst, quoting her in the press release for third-party validation.
Sales Enablement: She prioritized enabling internal sales teams, creating tools focused on leveraging the existing Salesforce customer base and highlighting platform benefits in addition to product features. She ensured sales incentives and relevant validation (customer stories, analyst quotes) were in place.
Outcome: This strategic and comprehensive approach led to the product’s strong performance in its debut year, demonstrating the impact of thoughtful PGTM.

Strategic and Comprehensive Approach

Michelle’s success wasn’t just about completing tasks but weaving together the four fundamentals strategically.

Ambassador: Understood customer timing needs and recognized the internal salesforce as a key customer.
Strategist: Made smart launch decisions based on customer realities, not just event size; intentionally tied the product to the broader platform strategy.
Storyteller: Crafted a story that gave the product meaning for customers, the industry, and Salesforce itself.
Evangelist: Identified and enabled key influencers (analysts, customers, sales teams) for launch success.

Beyond the Checklist

A checklist of tasks (messaging, press release, sales tools) doesn’t capture the strategic context (the when and why) that made Michelle’s PGTM effective. Strategic thinking is essential for achieving superior results.

This chapter introduces the power of strategic product go-to-market planning, demonstrating how intentional decisions about timing, positioning, and enabling evangelists can lead to significant business impact beyond just building a great product.

Chapter 15: What the iPhone Shows Us About Adoption Life Cycles

This chapter explores the technology adoption life cycle and how understanding it is crucial for strategic product go-to-market, using the iPhone as a prime example.

The Online Backup Story

An online backup company’s experience highlights the importance of understanding who your early adopters are and whether they position you for future growth.

Initial Success: The company found success acquiring customers through paid radio host endorsements.
High CAC: Relying solely on paid acquisition became too expensive.
Customer Analysis: A deeper dive revealed their customer base skewed old (seniors), who were easy to retain but didn’t generate word-of-mouth or reviews needed for organic growth.
Marketing Overhaul: They had to completely change their marketing activities to focus on channels that brought in customers (people in their early 30s listening to NPR) who would talk about the product, positioning them for sustainable growth.
Expensive Lesson: This was an expensive and time-consuming lesson in aligning marketing efforts with the technology adoption curve and focusing on the right customers for growth.

Technology Adoption Life Cycle

Any new technology product flows through different adopter groups over time.

The Curve: Follows a bell curve: Innovators (2.5%), Early Adopters (13.5%), Early Majority (34%), Late Majority (34%), and Laggards (16%).
Timeframe: These cycles typically take 7-10+ years to move through.
Common Mistake: Companies often believe they are moving through segments faster than they are or don’t realize their initial segments aren’t setting them up for the next stage.
Nuanced Segmentation: Modern marketing uses various segmentation factors (demographics, psychographics, industry, technographics, firmographics, behavior, intent, product usage, account actions) beyond just the adoption curve.
PMM’s Role: PMM applies the adoption curve to GTM thinking, understanding each segment’s impact on subsequent adoption and helping prioritize segments for marketing.

Applying Life-Cycle Dynamics to Product Go-to-Market Actions

GTM actions should align with the specific adopter segment being targeted to drive future success.

Superhuman Example: Superhuman focused on discerning early customers (“the ones who would enjoy the product for its greatest benefit and help spread the word”) to drive their GTM.
Counterintuitive Practices: Their GTM included clear positioning, referral programs for early adopters, a qualification process for beta acceptance, monetization at the start, and required onboarding calls—practices designed to target and leverage the right early customers.
B2B Scenario: In B2B, GTM approaches vary significantly based on the target segment (e.g., targeting end-users vs. CISOs) and company maturity, even for the same product.
Avoid Overgeneralization: Don’t overgeneralize customer segments (e.g., SMB, mid-market, enterprise); define marketable segments with specific attributes and behaviors.

Be Thoughtful and Patient

Moving through the adoption life cycle takes deliberate action and time, even for highly successful products.

iPhone Example: Even the iPhone, a wildly successful product, took years and a steady evolution in product, distribution, pricing, advertising, and promotions to move through different adoption segments, eventually reaching later adopters like the author’s mother.
Long Game: Understand that it will take time for your product to move through its adoption life cycle, and plan your GTM accordingly.

This chapter underscores that understanding the technology adoption life cycle and strategically targeting the right customer segments at each stage is crucial for sustainable growth and effective product go-to-market, even for the most innovative products.

Chapter 16: The Brand Lever

This chapter discusses the strategic importance of brand for tech products, arguing it’s about consistent experience and a promise to the customer, not just visual identity.

Netflix’s Brand Experience

Netflix built its brand by consistently delivering a great customer experience.

Beyond Visuals: Brand is more than name, logo, and design; it’s about a consistent experience across every aspect of how a company acts.
The Promise: Brand is a promise between a customer and a company.
Example: Netflix’s decision to notify customers before charging their credit cards at the end of a free trial, even though it cost them revenue, demonstrated a commitment to being respectful and built a positive brand impression, crucial for future growth.
Strategic Advantage: In crowded markets, brand can be a tool for strategic advantage, shifting the playing field beyond features.

Brand in Tech

For most people, the brand of a tech company is heavily influenced by their product experience, but also includes interactions across support, sales, and even pricing.

Workiva Example: Workiva (formerly WebFilings) built unmatched loyalty and became a category leader through deep investment in customer success, making customers feel they couldn’t fail. Their customers loved them despite a generic initial brand identity.
Consistent Experience: Brand is about consistent delivery of the company’s promise across all customer touchpoints.
Long-Term Loyalty: Investing in a strong corporate brand builds long-term customer loyalty that extends across products and changes.
PMM’s Role: PMM should consider the company’s overall brand situation in its GTM strategy and how the product delivers against the desired brand experience.

Brand Situations for PMM

Common scenarios where brand work at the product level is relevant for product marketing.

Expanding Product Scope: When a product name or perception is too narrow for its expanded functionality (e.g., Read It Later rebranding to Pocket).
Brand Strategy Informs PGTM: Broader company brand strategy often determines how an individual product is marketed (e.g., organizing products into lines of business or suites).
Leveraging Product Loyalty: Using the loyalty associated with a specific product brand to acquire new audiences for other products (e.g., Intuit’s QuickBooks, Atlassian’s Jira).
Penetrating Market with New Brand: Creating a new line of business or key brand when the existing brand has baggage or doesn’t connect with a target market (e.g., Microsoft’s Xbox).
Product Naming: PMM often drives naming decisions, which are a form of brand strategy, helping customers understand what a product does and for whom.
Bigger Battlefronts: Recognizing when a company faces a broader brand problem that goes beyond individual products (e.g., Netscape being perceived as embattled because of its browser, despite other strong businesses).

This chapter emphasizes that brand is a powerful strategic lever for tech products, driven by consistent customer experience, and PMM plays a key role in ensuring product-level brand strategy aligns with and supports the overall company brand.

Chapter 17: The Pricing Lever

This chapter explores pricing and packaging as strategic levers for product go-to-market, arguing that pricing is about perceived value, not just cost.

Nike Sunglasses Story

Lauchengco’s experience in a focus group for Nike sunglasses illustrates how perceived value drives pricing decisions.

Initial Preference: Participants ranked sunglasses based on personal preference (style, feel) without knowing prices.
Price Revealed: Upon seeing the prices, preferences shifted dramatically; the highest-ranked pair at a high price dropped to the lowest choice, while a lower-ranked pair at a lower price (better aligned with intended use case) became the top pick.
Perceived Value: This demonstrates that the value customers place on a product is relative to its price from that company and their intended use, not an absolute measure.
Brand Influence: Brand plays a significant role in perceived value (e.g., Apple vs. Fitbit watch pricing).

Pricing Basics

Pricing is about value engineering, aligning price with perceived value and willingness to pay.

Value vs. Cost: Pricing is based on customers’ perceived value and willingness to pay, not the cost of production.
Perceived Value Problem: Often, a “pricing problem” is actually a perceived value problem.
Influencing Factors: Context, brand, competitive alternatives, availability, ease, and budget all factor into a customer’s value calculation.
Specialized Practice: Pricing is increasingly complex due to dynamic technical infrastructures and requires specialized expertise.

Who Owns Pricing?

Ownership of pricing varies, but PMM is a critical influencer.

Monetization Strategy: Deciding how and when to make money; often a joint effort between product, business ops, and PMM.
Pricing Strategy: Determining the actual price; often driven by finance or business ops, especially in mature companies, considering funnel dynamics, costs, and sales input.
Packaging Strategy: Creating bundles for customer segments or use cases; typically driven by PMM with product partnership.
PMM’s Role: PMM grounds pricing in real customer value and ensures it serves segments and business goals.

Make Pricing Easy and Good for Business

Pricing should be simple for customers to understand while supporting the company’s financial success.

Simple Unit of Measure: Use a unit that customers understand and reflects the product’s value (e.g., per storage amount, per usage).
Easy Calculation: Pricing should be simple enough for customers to do the math easily.
Easily Measurable: Compliance and IT teams need to easily measure usage or compliance with contract terms.
CFO/Procurement Understanding: Pricing needs to be understandable from a total cost of ownership and ROI perspective, compared to other contracts.

What Drives Your Business?

Pricing strategy should align with the company’s desired market position (cheap vs. best).

Cheap vs. Best: Decide which end of the spectrum matches your product and GTM.
Evangelism: Inexpensive or free versions can capture evangelists, but premium pricing can foster exclusivity.
Premium Pricing: If customers aren’t complaining about the price for a premium product, you might be leaving money on the table.
Finding Breaking Points: Don’t be afraid to test pricing in the market with actual customers to find breaking points and understand perceived value.

Use Packaging for Customer Segments

Packaging is about creating bundles that serve customers and the business, reducing decision fatigue.

Bundling Purpose: Packaging moves people toward a purchase decision; too many options can prevent it.
Complexity: Complexity in pricing and packaging creates friction in the sales and buying process.
Packaging Strategies: Various strategies exist (All Inclusive, Platform + Add-Ons, Good, Better, Best) suitable for different product stages and use cases.
Editions: A common way to package for customer segments or use cases, with entry-level editions including must-haves and subsequent levels catering to specific needs or driving higher ASP.

This chapter emphasizes that pricing and packaging are strategic levers for product marketing, focusing on aligning price with perceived value, making pricing easy for customers, and using packaging to serve different segments and business goals effectively.

Chapter 18: Marketing When It’s Not About Product

This chapter argues that effective marketing can and should happen even when there aren’t significant new product features to promote, focusing instead on market trends, customer needs, and brand building.

Marketing Beyond Product

Companies will inevitably face times when product development isn’t the primary marketing catalyst.

Real-World Events: Global events, market shifts, and external factors can significantly impact marketing focus.
Rethinking Marketing: These periods are opportunities to rethink how to market when new product isn’t the driver.
PMM’s Role: PMM plays a key role in interpreting market signals and using them to inform content, programs, and leverage existing product assets.

Campaigns Beyond Product

Marketing campaigns don’t always need to be about product features; they can address market opportunities or challenges directly.

Examples: Leveraging black-swan events (like a pandemic), targeting specific micro-verticals, amplifying company events (acquisition, IPO), activating dormant customer segments, shifting brand perception, or converting competitive users.
Strategic Framing: PMM can architect the why and when for these campaigns based on market insights, even if marketing executes the what and how.

Invest in the Emotionality of Your Brand

Periods without product focus are a great time to deepen the emotional connection with customers.

Beyond Rational: Brand is about aspirations and how it makes people feel, which tech companies often underinvest in because it doesn’t directly tie to sales.
Relationship Building: Marketing programs can deepen relationships with customers beyond just being a technology vendor.

Improve Collaboration Between Marketing and Sales

These periods offer an opportunity to enhance marketing-sales collaboration beyond standard meetings and reporting.

Deeper Coordination: Create tightly coordinated campaigns focused on specific moments in time or highly targeted customer segments.
PMM Input: PMM’s deep market awareness is crucial for providing input and inspiration to both sales and marketing teams during these times.

Examine the Customer Journey

Periods without product focus allow for closer attention to how customers discover and consider products, including often-overlooked parts of the journey.

Blended Journey: Customers’ journeys are blended (online and offline), involving conversations with peers and serendipitous discovery.
Points of Influence: Pay closer attention to points of influence outside of official channels, like customer reviews, third-party blogs, social media, and meetups.
Marketing Mix: Revisit the marketing mix to see if traditional marketing (outdoor, radio, TV) could be effective.

Enable Evangelism from Customers

Actively enabling existing customers to advocate for the product is more powerful than company-led promotion.

Authentic Advocacy: Aim for wildly evangelistic fans who genuinely want to share their positive experiences.
Beyond Referrals: Enabling evangelism goes beyond referral programs; it includes making customers successful and building trusted relationships.

Activate Your Community

Community is a powerful way to scale evangelism.

Scaling Advocacy: Provides forums for users to ask questions, problem-solve, and advocate for the product.
Two-Way Learning: Can include customer councils for in-depth feedback and mutual learning.
Beyond Scaffolding: True community is about facilitating genuine dialogue and advocacy among loyal users.

Modern Hire Example

The Modern Hire story demonstrates how a company can act swiftly during a black-swan event (COVID-19 pandemic) with a customer-centric, coordinated campaign that wasn’t about a new product feature.

Strategic Response: Instead of copying competitors with “free video interviewing,” they elevated the importance of better candidate experiences and smarter hiring decisions.
Coordinated Effort: They crafted a comprehensive campaign involving sales enablement and a wide range of marketing activities, launching iteratively.
Sales as Extension: Sales acted as an extension of marketing outreach, using personalized approaches based on campaign content.
Impact: The campaign resulted in record leads, significant website traffic/SEO increases, major new client wins, and double-digit revenue growth while competitors faced layoffs.
Best Practices: This success exhibited key practices: thoughtful but swift action, leveraging product differentiators without focusing on new features, customer-centricity, emphasizing perceived value over free offerings, using a multifaceted approach, and tight marketing-sales alignment.

This chapter shows that effective marketing is possible even without new product features by focusing on market trends, customer needs, strategic campaigns, brand building, strengthening marketing-sales collaboration, understanding the customer journey, and enabling evangelism and community.

Chapter 19: The One-Sheet Product Go-to-Market Canvas

This chapter introduces a practical tool, the One-Sheet Product Go-to-Market (PGTM) Canvas, designed to drive alignment between product and go-to-market teams by clarifying strategies and key activities.

The Bandwidth Story

The experience at Bandwidth, where growth stalled for key accounts due to misalignment between product development and go-to-market teams, highlights the need for a structured approach to coordination.

The Problem: Top accounts weren’t growing as fast as the next 50, whose needs were vastly different, causing friction in prioritizing product and GTM efforts.
Lack of Alignment: Go-to-market teams felt disconnected from product development, and product marketing was too focused on tactics over strategy.
PGTM Working Session: The product leader initiated a meeting with sales, marketing, product marketing, and business development to bring market insights together.
Outcome: Using a PGTM canvas, they achieved better alignment, clarified GTM strategies and key activities, and provided the product team with a market-oriented framework for prioritization.

Product Go-to-Market Canvas: Think Puzzle

The PGTM Canvas is a lightweight framework to visualize and align product go-to-market.

Analogy: It’s like giving everyone the picture of a puzzle before they start building, with borders providing reference points.
Benefits: Quickly shows opportunities/misalignment, keeps teams focused, communicates key activities, clarifies the why behind actions, and promotes strategic alignment.
Living Document: Owned and driven by product marketing, it’s a dynamic tool, not a static comprehensive plan.
Input: It incorporates customer reality, external environment, product milestones, marketing strategies, and key activities.

The Canvas Process

Steps for using the One-Sheet PGTM Canvas collaboratively.

Setup: A roughly three-hour cross-functional meeting to discuss market realities, what’s working/not, and conduct a SWOT analysis.
Step 1: Document key customer/outside environment factors.
Step 2: List known product milestones/commitments.
Step 3: Define marketing strategies aligned with business goals (the guardrails).
Step 4: List key activities supporting the strategies (important actions for others).
Leverage Strengths: Ensure strategies leverage opportunities and strengths while addressing weaknesses.
Step 5: Work from the outside edges in, starting with the end goal and working backward to ensure foundations are in place.
Step 6: Revise the canvas based on initial discussions, refining ideas and filling gaps, aiming for quarterly revisions.

Make It Customer First!

Anchoring the PGTM plan in the customer’s perspective is crucial for effectiveness.

Optimization: Optimize GTM actions based on what customers want to hear and when they are receptive.
Tailoring: Consider how the messenger (sales rep vs. customer success) impacts the message’s reception.

PGTM Canvas in Action

Details from the initial Bandwidth PGTM kickoff meeting.

Identified Gaps: Lack of clear brand/position, insufficient understanding of key growth customer segments, digital assets not reflecting target audiences, poor feedback loop from sales to product/PMM, lack of win/loss analysis, unclear ongoing value for customers.
Framework Shape: The canvas started to address these gaps by defining strategies to deepen engagement, become a thought leader, and become a leading provider for key segments, listing initial activities to support them.
Outcome: The canvas created alignment and confidence across functions, shifting focus towards the high-growth customer segment and leveraging product decisions for market impact.

This chapter provides a practical framework, the One-Sheet PGTM Canvas, to help product marketing drive strategic alignment across product and go-to-market teams, ensuring activities are intentional and address key market realities and business goals.

Chapter 20: Understanding in Action

This chapter illustrates how product go-to-market (PGTM) work translates into actual marketing plans, examining examples from companies at different stages of maturity.

PGTM Canvas vs. Marketing Plan

The PGTM canvas provides the strategic framework for a marketing plan, but they are distinct documents.

PGTM Canvas: Drives alignment between product and marketing activity, setting the strategic frame.
Marketing Plan: Covers all marketing activities, embedding the product-oriented strategy from the PGTM canvas.

Early Stage Marketing Plan

For startups, the PGTM canvas and marketing plan should be closely aligned, focusing on discovering repeatable growth.

Example Goal: Transition to early majority through brand and marketing.
Critique: The example plan was too long, lacked a measurable business goal tied to establishing a customer base (like number of customers or revenue), didn’t include objectives for holding a market position, and overestimated the company’s position on the adoption curve (“early majority”).
Key Results: Should pair quantity with quality (e.g., including metrics like sales cycle time, average contract value, win/loss rate) to ensure pipeline health, not just volume.
Objectives vs. Strategies: The example confused objectives with key results and strategies with tactics; at early stage, figuring out GTM is the strategy.
Better Early Stage: Good early stage plans set a strategic frame, identify key actions, leave room for learning/adaptation, and are clear on what to measure to see if the business is succeeding.

Scaling Stage Marketing Plan

At this stage, the focus shifts to accelerating growth based on what has been proven to work, refining segments and processes.

Example Goals: Define category leadership, create predictable demand generation, harness partner ecosystem.
Critique: Lacked a direct link to a business goal (e.g., driving pipeline and improving conversion to meet a specific revenue target).
Strategies vs. Tactics: Strategies should be about how to achieve goals (e.g., elevate industry validation, optimize funnel stages, increase channel experimentation), not process steps (e.g., build foundation, operationalize).
PMM Contribution: PMM work is crucial here for amplifying market position, refining target segments, enabling sales and evangelism, and exploring new distribution channels.

Mature Stage Marketing Plan

Mature companies focus on sustained growth, often across multiple products and in complex organizations.

Example Goal: Grow new product line revenue as a percentage of overall revenue.
Alignment: Even at this stage, marketing plans should tie directly to company goals to justify activities and demonstrate business impact.
PMM Contribution: PMM work is heavily leveraged, defining categories, targeting audiences, and developing product line strategies.
Organizational Complexity: Plans at this stage require clear articulation of how they will be rolled out and supported across a large, distributed organization.
Tailored Focus: Marketing work is not evenly distributed; PMM focuses on areas of greatest market need (new products, product suites, key verticals), not all products equally.

Pro Tips in Crafting Good Marketing Plans

Recommendations applicable across all company stages.

Define the Playing Field: Clearly define the category and how to evaluate solutions within it; don’t assume the market understands the context.
Beware Paid Marketing: Access to large budgets can mask a lack of organic growth; focus on building a strong organic foundation through content, social media, reviews, and evangelism.
Connect Strategic Thinking: The best marketing plans integrate the strategic GTM thinking from product marketing, ensuring activities are meaningful and aligned with the product vision.

This chapter demonstrates how the strategic thinking in product marketing, particularly as captured in a PGTM canvas, provides the essential foundation for effective marketing plans that are aligned with business goals and adapt to company maturity.

Chapter 21: Discover Your Position

This chapter begins Part Four, focusing on storytelling, and delves into the critical product marketing task of positioning—shaping how the world thinks about your product.

Brendan O’Conner’s RSA Story

The story of AppOmni’s co-founder testing messaging at a security conference highlights the fundamental challenge of getting people to understand something new by relating it to what they already know.

The Challenge: Despite having a novel solution for cloud security, Brendan found that security leaders related his new product to existing tools or competitors, demonstrating that people make sense of the new using the familiar.
Iterative Learning: Brendan continued to listen, learn, and adapt AppOmni’s messaging based on real-world conversations, discovering what customers needed to hear and the gaps in their understanding.

Positioning and Messaging Relationship

Clarifying the distinct but related concepts of positioning and messaging.

Positioning: The long-term outcome; the product’s place in customers’ minds and how it’s differentiated.
Messaging: The short-term actions; key statements that reinforce positioning and build credibility.
Beyond Formulas: Both work best when embedded in a bigger story, providing context and reasons to believe.

Positioning Takes Time

Establishing a clear market position is a long-term effort.

Consistent Reinforcement: Positioning is made real through the combination of all go-to-market activities over time (e.g., Microsoft Office consistently using “integrated office suite”).
Beyond Messaging: Activities like assessment guides, sales training, and leveraging evangelism channels (comparison sites, reviews, social media) all influence market perception and reinforce positioning.
External Influence: Word-of-mouth and external sentiment also significantly impact a product’s perception.

Good Messaging Is Harder Than It Looks

Effective messaging goes beyond simple benefits and speaks to customers’ deeper needs and context.

Beyond Taglines: It’s not just a catchy phrase or benefit statement.
Market-Driven Process: Good messaging comes from a market-driven process grounded in deep customer insight.
Understanding Customer World: It requires understanding the target market’s daily lives, what they already believe, and their knowledge gaps, and then bridging those gaps.
Anticipating Skepticism: Messaging must be credible, anticipating that customers are skeptical of new technology promises.

Accuracy for the Engineering Trained

Balancing technical accuracy with clarity and simplicity for a wider audience.

Precision vs. Understanding: For engineers, precision is key to credibility, but for a wider audience, simplifying and providing context is crucial for understanding.
Bridging the Gap: Messaging’s job is to connect first before diving into technical details, providing a “You Are Here” marker in people’s mental maps.
Still Accurate: Simplifying doesn’t mean being inaccurate; if everything said is true, it is still accurate, even if not technically precise in all details.

This chapter establishes that positioning is a long-term outcome of all go-to-market activities, while messaging is the key tool for telling the product’s story and shaping perception, requiring deep customer understanding and a balance of clarity and technical relevance.

Chapter 22: How to Listen and Connect

This chapter delves into the process of creating compelling messaging by listening to customers and connecting with their perspectives, using Expensify and Concur as contrasting examples.

Expensify vs. Concur Messaging

Comparing early Expensify messaging with a competitor highlights the power of connecting emotionally and using simple, authentic language.

Expensify’s Success: Expensify’s early messaging (“Expense reports that don’t suck! Hassle-free expense reporting built for employees and loved by admins”) resonated strongly because it felt emotional, true, efficiently communicated benefits, and covered multiple audiences.
Competitor Messaging: Generic messaging (e.g., focusing on “efficiency and effectiveness” without specifics) is common but fails to differentiate or connect with customers.
Beyond Absolute Best: The “best messaging” is not absolute but is the one that balances strategic needs, performs well for the product’s GTM, and positions effectively.

Listen and Learn

Creating compelling messaging requires deeply understanding customers’ daily lives and frustrations.

Feeling Known: People want to feel known and seen; messaging should reflect this understanding.
Open-Ended Questions: Use open-ended questions to understand their frustrations, motivations, and how they solve problems today.
Probing Questions: Ask questions like “Tell me what your average day looks like,” “What really frustrates you?”, “What was the straw that broke the camel’s back?”, “What would a magic wand do?”, or “What’s the last problem at work you spent money to fix?”.
Listen for Language: Pay attention to the words customers use and how they talk about their problems.
Testing Ideas: Test different messaging directions based on learned insights; what resonates might be surprising.

Choose Credibility and Clarity

Messaging should prioritize credibility and clarity, using language that resonates with the target audience.

SAP Concur Example: SAP Concur’s messaging, while perhaps tested and approved internally, is generic and less compelling (“Better travel and expense management. Always.”) compared to Expensify’s specific, emotionally resonant language.
Focus on Audience: Messaging needs to match the temperament and language of the generation and audience it’s trying to reach.
Evocative Language: Use evocative, energizing language that helps connect with the target market.

X-Raying Messaging

Analyzing messaging line by line to see how it connects with customers.

Concur Analysis: Concur’s messaging is generic, makes broad claims without explaining why, focuses on product names first, and uses technical/tired language (“automate and integrate your AP process”).
Expensify Analysis: Expensify’s messaging uses relatable language (“road warrior,” “accountant buried in paperwork”), shows they get the customer’s reality, promises automation, and provides specific examples (“one-click,” “next-day reimbursement”) that highlight key differentiators in simple terms.

CAST: A Simple Guide

Using the CAST framework—Clear, Authentic, Simple, Tested—to evaluate messaging.

Clear: Is it easy to understand what you do and why it’s intriguing? Avoid comprehensive over clear.
Authentic: Is the language meaningful to the customer and makes them feel known?
Simple: Is it easy to grasp what’s compelling or different?
Tested: Was it tested in the context customers will experience it?

This chapter emphasizes that crafting compelling messaging is an outcome of deep listening to customers, using language that feels authentic and resonates with their reality, and prioritizing credibility and clarity over generic claims.

Chapter 23: Understanding in Action

This chapter provides in-depth examples of how successful companies like Netflix and Zendesk developed and evolved their messaging over time to reflect changing market conditions, business strategies, and customer behavior.

Netflix’s Messaging Evolution

Netflix’s messaging adapted as the company shifted from DVDs to streaming and built its brand.

DVD Era (2009): Messaging focused on addressing the problems of video rental stores (cost, inconvenience, limited choice). Key phrases highlighted affordability (“Only $8.99 a month”), variety (“Classics to New Releases”), convenience (“Free DVD shipping”), and trust (“Cancel anytime,” visible support number). Visuals emphasized family movie night at home. Messaging was clear on benefits and authentic in capturing frustrations.
Streaming Shift (2014): Messaging shifted to emphasize streaming’s benefits over DVDs. Phrases like “Watch TV shows & movies… anytime, anywhere” highlighted convenience across devices. Price was still prominent (“Only $7.99 a month”). The call to action was “Start Your Free Month.” Visuals featured large, flat-screen TVs and showed the product experience. Messaging was clear and simple about streaming advantages and authentic to changing viewing behavior.
Brand Leads (2016): With streaming established, messaging leveraged the brand and focused on content. “See what’s next” invited customers to be part of the cultural zeitgeist and differentiated Netflix. “Watch Anywhere” was a simple promise about product capability. “Join” replaced “Start Your Free Trial,” reflecting a shift to community. Messaging was clear and simple, leveraging brand to create curiosity.
Long Game: Netflix’s messaging evolution took decades, demonstrating that great messaging and brand building take time and adapt to the technology adoption curve.

Zendesk’s Messaging Evolution

Zendesk’s messaging adapted as it pioneered a new GTM model for B2B software (free trial, direct-to-customer) and matured.

Early Days (2010-2011): Messaging anticipated customer questions and focused on ease and simplicity in a category known for complexity. Phrases like “Customer Support Made Easy” and “Beautifully simple customer service software” were prominent. They asked “What is Zendesk?” directly on the page and explained features in simple terms (e.g., “Web-based,” “elegant,” “self-service”). They were clear about what they did and authentic in using language their audience would appreciate. Homepage design included customer validation, global presence, multi-platform visuals, and a clear call to action (“no credit card needed”). Their tone was intentionally different and showed “love.”
Pre-IPO (2014): As the company matured and became known, messaging shifted to customer outcomes. “Customer satisfaction has never been easier” became a prominent phrase. Product positioning was simplified further: “Beautifully simple customer service software.” The homepage emphasized customer numbers (30,000+) and trust (great brands), and made calculating ROI easy.
Post-IPO: Zendesk doubled down on its core differentiators. “Beautifully simple… software for better customer service” continued to simplify their value. They put pricing upfront (“without needing to click”) as an authentic way to reduce friction and give customers what they wanted.
Website as Product: Both Netflix and Zendesk treated their websites as products, heavily testing and iterating messaging and design to optimize customer journey and conversion.

This chapter reinforces that successful messaging is a dynamic process, adapting to company stage, market conditions, and business strategy, and that companies like Netflix and Zendesk excelled by focusing on clarity, authenticity, and simplicity while continuously testing and iterating their messaging.

Chapter 24: The Balancing Act

This chapter discusses the balancing act of crafting messaging that is right for the market now while also positioning the product for the future, and the factors that influence this decision.

The Office and Loudcloud Stories

Lauchengco’s experiences at Microsoft (Office) and Loudcloud illustrate the challenge of marketing ahead of market readiness.

Office Internet Features: Despite customer focus groups showing low interest in “Internet-ready” features, Microsoft decided to lead with them in marketing, correctly predicting the market’s rapid shift. Their timing was right due to broader industry trends.
Loudcloud Cloud Services: Loudcloud tried to define a new category (“cloud as a power utility”) but were too early; there wasn’t enough industry momentum or common language for the messaging to stick, despite strong leadership and media coverage.
Judgment Call: Deciding whether your story is right now requires judgment based on deep knowledge of customers, industry, and technology trends.
Evidence is Key: Concrete evidence (trends, customer stories, adoption, pundits, data) is crucial for messaging and positioning to feel credible at any given time.

Right Category: Create New or Redefine Existing?

Choosing whether to create a new category or redefine an existing one impacts messaging and requires different levels of effort.

Creating New: Really hard, requires significant persistence, time, and resources, and depends on an industry shift where others follow (e.g., AWS, Netflix, SpaceX).
Redefining Existing: Easier, as there’s an existing “You are here” marker for customers to anchor understanding (e.g., Google surpassing Yahoo, iPhone surpassing Blackberry, Salesforce surpassing Siebel).
Breaking Down Categories: All tech categories break into smaller subcategories, constantly adjusting.
Messaging Role: Messaging connects with customers; how much to lean into a “new vision” depends on company stage, market situation, resources, and external evidence of a shift. Selling a vision requires a story supported by evidence.

Leveraging Product Managers

Product managers are key allies in developing messaging.

Product Vision: They hold the product vision and strategy, understanding how the future intersects with current capabilities.
Technical Accuracy & Inspiration: They can ensure technical accuracy and inspire story ideas (e.g., how AI improves specific features now, not just how it might be used in the future).

Leveraging Sales

Sales teams are critical for validating messaging.

Real-World Input: They use messaging daily and can gauge customer reactions.
Authenticity: Sales’ phrasing can be more authentic and effective than messaging developed solely by marketing (as seen in the story where the Head of Sales’ message outperformed the CEO’s and marketing’s).
Collaboration: Collaborate with sales to develop messaging and validate it in the field.

Leveraging Search Trends and Techniques

Search data can inform messaging and positioning.

Discovery: SEO casts a net based on how people search, which should inform messaging.
Input, Not Driver: Search data is an input, not the sole determinant of final messaging.
Techniques: Use search trends (comparing terms), search journey testing (watching user search behavior), targeted ad buys (testing different messaging directions), and keyword audits (identifying relevant terms) to inform messaging.

It’s a Balancing Act

The balance between marketing the present and positioning for the future depends on company stage and market dynamics.

Early Stage: Focus on the pain and problems the product solves now, creating mental connectors to help people understand what you do. This is also the time to define or redefine the category.
Mature Stage: The product and category are more understood; messaging can be more aspirational, focusing on building a long-term position that redefines the category’s goalposts towards the company’s vision.
Evidence and Restraint: Regardless of stage, messaging needs evidence to be credible and should be crafted with restraint, not just puffery.

This chapter emphasizes that crafting effective messaging requires a strategic balancing act between addressing current customer needs and positioning for the future, influenced by market readiness, product managers, sales input, search data, and grounded in evidence.

Chapter 25: The One-Sheet Messaging Canvas

This chapter introduces the One-Sheet Messaging Canvas, a practical tool designed to consolidate product messaging, ensure consistency across teams, and facilitate collaboration.

The Collaboration-to-Mediocrity Story

An anecdote about a startup team struggling to create a better pitch highlights the pitfalls of unfocused collaboration and the need for a structured approach to messaging.

The Problem: Competitive pressure required a better pitch quickly, but input from various leaders (marketing, product, sales) led to a disjointed, un-tested presentation.
Lack of Structure: Without a clear process or tool to guide messaging development and integration, ideas were simply added together, resulting in a mediocre outcome.
PMM’s Role: Product marketing is the “product manager” for the product’s story and messaging, responsible for collecting input and crafting a strong output.

How It Works

The One-Sheet Messaging Canvas provides a toolkit for product messaging.

Building Blocks: Separates messaging elements (positioning, benefits, proof) into individual blocks that can be used for different GTM purposes.
Consistency: By using the same toolkit, all teams talking about the product reinforce market position over time.
Process Over Form: Don’t fill it out like a form; use it to document ideas, test, probe, and refine messaging iteratively with teams and customers.
Artifact: The completed canvas becomes the primary written artifact for everyone communicating about the product.

The Canvas Process

Steps for collaboratively creating the Messaging Canvas.

Setup: Messaging discovery (customer interviews, micro-surveys) to find customer language and context.
Step 1: Identify the most important target Customer Segments.
Step 2: Develop “starter” messaging and key support messages (pillars) based on what customers want to hear and what makes you credible.
Step 3: List areas of value (benefits, use cases) in customer-friendly language under each pillar.
Step 4: Designate which messages are appropriate for specific audiences using unique symbols.
Step 5: Provide evidence (customer stories, data, research, analyst quotes) to support claims and enable evangelism.
Step 6: Test the messaging with customers in the intended mediums (email, website, presentations) and iterate based on responses (looking for curiosity, not just approval).
Step 7: Refine the canvas based on testing and practice saying the messages out loud; use CAST guidelines (Clear, Authentic, Simple, Tested) for a final check.

The Messaging Canvas in Action

An example from IndexTank, a startup acquired by LinkedIn, shows how the canvas evolved through testing.

Initial Draft: An early draft showed messaging pillars tailored to different audiences (developers, ops/IT, product people).
Discovery Insight: Testing revealed a third segment, developer evangelists, who were key for word-of-mouth, leading to messaging that also intrigued general app developers.
Testing Shift: Website testing showed that while app developers were curious, larger websites were better customers, leading to a shift in the positioning statement to “Easily add powerful search to your site. Good search is good for business,” emphasizing value for the business.

FAQs about Messaging Canvas

Common questions about using the canvas.

Process Time: For startups, initial drafts are quick (less than a week), but testing/refinement can take a month; updates are frequent. For mature companies, it can take longer (months), but is more stable once set.
Customer Input: Messaging is customer-informed, not solely customer-driven; customer insights are inputs to be balanced with other factors.
Multi-Product Companies: Create one canvas for each product or product family.
Single-Sheet Constraint: The single-page format forces concision and prioritization; deeper information can be provided in other assets.

This chapter provides a practical, collaborative tool for product marketing to consolidate messaging, ensure consistency across teams, and anchor the product’s story in what customers need to hear, driving better outcomes than disjointed efforts.

Chapter 26: Leading and Transforming Product Marketing

This chapter focuses on leadership in product marketing, discussing how to define the function’s role, structure teams, and drive transformation, using the example of Mala Sharma at Adobe.

Mala Sharma’s Adobe Transformation

Mala Sharma, a seasoned product marketing leader, transformed the function at Adobe by applying her prior experience from consumer-packaged goods and management consulting.

Early Observation: In Silicon Valley, she noticed a lack of connection between market actions and business impact, with PMM often seen simply as producing collateral.
Modeling Strategic PMM: She immediately initiated customer research, found a gamer niche that shifted strategy, and started showing up at meetings to understand market opportunities better than anyone else, modeling strategic thinking.
Hiring Strategy: She transformed the function by hiring outside leaders with diverse backgrounds (CPG, tech, consulting) known for strategic acumen and business-mindedness.
Defining Roles & Processes: At Adobe scale, she defined PMM’s role relative to other functions (PM, campaign marketing, sales) and worked with internal teams to create written artifacts detailing collaboration points and expectations.
Training Investment: She invested in training new hires to ensure they understood the PMM model and expectations.
Key Insight: PMMs succeed by challenging discussions with customer insights and being unafraid to put difficult choices on the table, constantly improving GTM thinking and unlocking growth.

Where Should Product Marketing Report?

The effectiveness of product marketing depends less on reporting structure (marketing vs. product) and more on how it’s allocated to product teams and the business problems being solved.

PMM to PM Ratio: Average is 2.6 PMs to 1 PMM, ranging up to 5:1, depending on GTM model and organizational support.
Organize Under Marketing: Often when products are established and growth requires market focus (refined segmentation, GTM coordination); PMM acts as an overlay across products, driven by markets/customers.
Organize Under Product: Common for highly technical products, continuous development environments, or when communicating the product is a challenge; reduces friction for PMM to get product info to GTM teams and bring market voice to product.
Leverage Leader’s Capacity: The leader’s experience and capabilities can influence reporting structure; put PMM under the leader (CPO or CMO) best equipped to help the function reach its potential.

Defining the Scope of the Role

The scope of product marketing evolves with company maturity and organizational structure.

Early Stage: PMMs are versatile generalists, interpreting market signals and applying skills broadly.
Mature Stage: PMMs tend to specialize (verticals, channels, segments); team size grows; PMMs focus on areas of greatest market need.
Rebooting PMM: For existing PMM groups, examine gaps in expectations/performance from partner functions and create new structures/processes with clear metrics.
Organizational Dynamics: Address issues like trust deficits (lack of curiosity, data use) and frustration (PMM focusing on execution over market reaction); define processes for priority setting and collaboration.

The Importance of Inclusive Team Norms

Effective product marketing teams are inclusive and prioritize psychological safety.

Diverse Perspectives: Diversity in teams allows for seeing things that might otherwise be missed, leading to better decisions (e.g., understanding different customer segments or cultural nuances).
Beyond Hiring: Inclusion goes beyond diverse hires; it’s about how the team works together.
Project Aristotle: Google’s study identified psychological safety, dependability, structure/clarity, meaning, and impact as key factors for high-performing teams.
Psychological Safety: Feeling safe to take risks, ask questions, offer ideas, and disagree without fear of negative consequences.
Leader’s Role: Leaders must model desired behaviors (making quiet people heard, speaking last, embracing different views) to create a safe and effective working environment, crucial for PMMs operating cross-functionally.

This chapter emphasizes that leading product marketing involves defining its purpose, structuring teams effectively, addressing organizational dynamics, and fostering an inclusive, psychologically safe environment that enables the function to reach its full potential and drive business growth.

Chapter 27: How to Hire Strong Product Marketing Talent

This chapter provides guidance on hiring effective product marketers, focusing on assessing key skills and raw ability beyond just experience.

The Interview Story

Lauchengco shares her experience interviewing three PMM candidates, highlighting the skills that differentiate a strong hire, especially for a startup.

Beyond Polished: The recommended candidate wasn’t the most polished but demonstrated adaptability, humility, and genuine curiosity—skills harder to teach.
Startup Needs: For early-stage companies, adaptability and curiosity are more important than extensive experience in specific industries or processes.
Tradeoffs: Hiring involves making tradeoffs and optimizing for the skills most important for the company’s stage and the potential for development.

Assessing the Skill Set

Evaluating candidates based on key product marketing skills.

Customer Curiosity & Listening: Assess ability to interpret market signals, make connections from diverse information, and translate insights into action. Interview for adaptability and willingness to reconsider points of view.
Product Curiosity & Technical Competence: Look for evidence of quick adaptation, a growth mindset, genuine interest in products, and willingness to learn. Interview about career transitions and product interests. Avoid being overly swayed by industry expertise alone.
Strategic & Execution Focused: Assess ability to define excellence, connect accomplishments to business results, and manage complex projects. Interview about biggest successes and how they were measured.
Collaborative: Look for evidence of collaborative processes (not just relationships) in developing tools (e.g., with sales) and messaging (with product). Interview about best cross-functional relationships they’ve seen.
Communication Skills: Evaluate written and verbal communication through interviews, work samples, and presentations. Look for ability to engage and adapt on the fly.

Assessing Raw Ability vs. Experience

A specific interview technique to gauge a candidate’s dynamic thinking and marketing talent.

The Question: “Tell me about a product or company you think is doing really great marketing. … Now pretend you are a marketing leader at a competitor. What two or three things would you consider most important to do to compete well?”
Why It Works: Discussing external companies where neither person has an information advantage forces focus on thinking process over prepared answers.
What to Look For:
- Breadth of Marketing Tool Set: Does the candidate define marketing broadly and understand various levers beyond just advertising or product features? Do they articulate why something is effective?
- Dealing with Change: How do they think on their feet and come up with new ideas when faced with unexpected shifts in the scenario?
- Openness to Information: Do they incorporate new information (introduced by the interviewer) into their thinking and adapt their perspective?
- Managing Constraints: How do they approach the challenge when budget or other constraints are introduced?
Calibration: Recognizing that dynamic marketing thinkers are rarer at earlier career stages but become more common with experience and good recruitment.

Let Every Candidate Shine

Structuring the interview process to allow candidates to demonstrate their abilities effectively.

Avoiding Bias: Discussing external companies helps avoid measuring candidates against preconceived ideas about your own company’s marketing.
Beyond Marketing Expertise: The interview should be able to assess marketing talent even if the interviewer isn’t a marketing expert themselves.
Rigor is Key: Be rigorous in interviewing and assessing candidates to make impactful hiring decisions.

This chapter provides a framework for hiring strong product marketing talent by focusing on assessing core skills like curiosity, adaptability, and collaboration, and using specific interview techniques to gauge raw ability and strategic thinking beyond just listed experience.

Chapter 28: How to Guide a Product Marketing Career

This chapter provides a roadmap for developing product marketing talent at different career stages, emphasizing the skills and experiences needed to grow into versatile leaders.

Career Path Versatility

A career in product marketing offers diverse paths (growth, product, marketing leadership, business units). Strong leaders help product marketers develop versatility.

Early Career (1-5 years)

Focus on broad, rapid learning and honing foundational skills.

Learning Focus: Interpret market signals, learn functional tasks well, and understand what excellence looks like through detailed feedback.
Leadership Opportunities: Allow them to lead initiatives (website redesign, campaign strategy) and learn to measure impact.
Functional Skills: Interpreting research, market testing, customer interviews, competitive analysis, demos, sales tools, website/thought leadership content.
Foundational Skills: Writing (concision, storytelling), oral communication (reading audience, adapting), productive discussions with stakeholders.
Frameworks & Tools: Provide systematic frameworks and tools to increase efficiency.
Next Level Indicator: Success managing someone or leading complex, high-impact projects outside the marketing team.

Mid-Level (5-12 years)

Expand functional skills and increase expectations for cross-functional guidance and leadership.

Increased Complexity: Take on managing multiple product lines or leading transitions (product to solution marketing).
Visibility: Become more visible leaders across the company.
Additional Functional Skills: Deepening knowledge of marketing specialties, enabling partners, marketing to verticals.
Additional Foundational Skills: Leading campaigns across functions, excellent communication/respect with product/sales, hiring, management (leading/scaling through others).
Next Level Indicator: Being requested by name for complex cross-functional projects. Encourage movement to other functions (product, marketing) for broader experience.

Senior (10+ years)

Demonstrate leadership, versatility, ability to navigate complex challenges, and continuous learning.

Experience & Learning: Success and ongoing learning in a broad range of scenarios, applying familiar playbooks but also adapting.
Process & Systems: Good at setting up systems for teams to perform better, especially with other functions.
Speed: Able to act swiftly as markets demand.
Failure: Experienced failure, learned from it, and can discuss it openly.
Additional Functional Skills: Company spokesperson, expert at negotiating challenges/conflict across teams.
Additional Foundational Skills: Leads together with other functions (shared success), seen as a leader by other functions.
Director to VP Jump: Requires developing leadership soft skills beyond functional excellence.

Director to VP Transition

Martina shares her personal experience and lessons learned on transitioning from Director to VP.

Beyond Marketing Excellence: VP is about enabling the team’s performance and creating structures for their success, not individual marketing abilities.
Company > Team: Focus on contributing to broader company goals and navigating leadership dynamics across functions, forging effective partnerships.
Redirect to “Why”: Help the organization understand the why behind marketing efforts, not just report on what is being done or campaign results.
Openness over Expertise: Balance demonstrating expertise with showing openness, inviting participation, and navigating challenges with grace and self-awareness.
Seeking Feedback: The hardest part is getting quality feedback on these less tangible leadership skills; seek honest feedback and forge a development plan.

This chapter provides a structured approach to guiding product marketing careers, emphasizing the development of both functional and foundational leadership skills at each stage, and highlighting the mindset shift required for senior leadership roles.

Chapter 29: Product Marketing by Stage

This chapter clarifies the expectations and focus of product marketing at different company stages: Early, Growth, and Mature, helping to calibrate hiring and responsibilities.

The Roadster Hiring Story

Michelle Denogean at Roadster faced a misalignment in expectations when veteran engineers wanted product marketers to focus on product adoption (more like PM or customer success) rather than strategic market leverage, highlighting common confusion about the role’s scope.

Misalignment: The product team’s definition of what they needed from product marketing didn’t align with the marketing leader’s, or standard, understanding of the role.
Root Cause: This confusion arises because product marketing’s scope isn’t always well understood, leading teams to project their own perceived gaps onto the role.
Calibration: Michelle recalibrated the product team’s expectations to align with what a product marketer actually does.

Early Stage: Ignition

This stage is characterized by rapid learning and discovering product/market fit.

Focus: Finding what consistently converts people into valuable customers through a lot of testing.
GTM Feel: Hand-to-hand combat, everything feels urgent; not ready for large marketing budgets.
PMM’s Role: At the forefront of interpreting market signal, translating it into GTM actions, and facilitating back-and-forth with customer-facing teams.
Key Activities: Refining messaging, developing early sales playbooks, discovering evangelists and influencers, and leading with a strong point of view beyond product features.
Required Skills: More experienced PMM, typically director level, capable of diverse tasks and crafting a compelling story.
Graduation: When GTM is repeatable for 2-3 quarters and there’s confidence in successful customer segments.

Growth Stage: Rapid Rise

This stage is about accelerating growth based on a proven baseline.

Challenge: What got you here won’t necessarily keep you growing; PMMs enable business strategy for new growth opportunities.
Competitive Forces: Significant factor; new upstarts or larger competitors may enter the space.
PMM’s Role: Helping the company own a market position through an elevated story and steady activity cadence, expanding market notions of the category, cultivating evangelists, and ensuring product additions are marketable and integrated into the story.
Risk: Stories can become too complex or ahead of market readiness; PMM brings market realities back to product teams.
Processes: PMM puts processes in place to connect product and GTM teams.
GTM Models: Companies may add new GTM models (PLG, direct sales); PMM’s scope shifts to support them.
Graduation: When the business shows strong, sustained revenue growth matching expectations for its size/stage.

Mature Companies: Peak Burn

This stage focuses on maintaining sustained growth across potentially complex product portfolios.

Challenge: Can have immature product marketing if roles aren’t clearly defined and consistently applied.
Impact: PMM impact is amplified; game-changing when done well, debilitating when not.
PMM’s Role (Example): Addressing competitive challenges by improving sales qualification, positioning, messaging (evidence-backed), competitive tools, and influencing future product versions.
Longer-Term Goals: PMM focuses on longer-term market goals (e.g., changing revenue mix, establishing new partnerships, positioning for future growth).
Evangelism: Ensuring strong evangelism foundation (sales enablement, influencer ecosystem) and understanding invisible market influence.
Tailored Application: Marketing work isn’t evenly distributed; PMM is applied intentionally to areas of greatest market need (new products, product suites, key verticals).
Business Enabler: PMM is a powerful business enabler with resources for both urgent and long-term work, but requires clear expectations.

Adjust Scope to Stage

Align the scope of product marketing with the company’s stage and communicate expectations clearly.

Core Responsibilities: Stay relatively stable across stages.
Range, Focus, Complexity: Change as companies mature.
Adaptability: Be unafraid to adapt the role’s scope as needed.

This chapter provides a framework for understanding product marketing’s evolving role across company stages, helping leaders to align expectations, calibrate hiring, and apply PMM resources effectively to address the unique challenges and opportunities at each stage.

Chapter 30: Mature Company Inflection Points

This chapter focuses on specific inflection points in mature companies where leveraging product marketing is particularly crucial for driving transformation and overcoming market inertia.

Examples of Inflection Points

Real-life scenarios illustrating moments when mature companies need to rethink their product and go-to-market strategies.

Data as a Product: An insurance company viewing customer data as a product for others.
Product Suites: A software company shifting to integrated product suites to address CIO recognition issues.
Subscription Membership: A company launching a new subscription model for its services.
International Expansion: A company expanding international business beyond its initial language/market.
Unlearning: These moments require overcoming both internal inertia and how the market perceives the company.

Leveraging PMM at Inflection Points

Major business initiatives driven by product changes require PMM to facilitate transformation.

Powerful Catalyst: PMM is a powerful catalyst in these processes due to its unique strengths.

“Traditional” Company Becomes Tech-First

How PMM helps traditional companies market new tech-driven products.

Example: A construction equipment company becoming tech-forward with precision construction and continuous data streaming.
Challenge: Connecting new tech products with traditional GTM approaches and overcoming internal resistance or muscle memory.
PMM’s Role: Acting as “customers” to internal teams (marketing, sales, dealers), ensuring product info goes beyond comparisons to highlight tech’s impact on customer lives, creating evidence (time studies), identifying influencers beyond early users, and trying new marketing tactics outside traditional norms.
Consistency: Steadfastly nudging the market and internal groups forward through consistent effort.

Single-Product Company Becomes Multi-Product

The challenges and PMM’s role when a company adds new products or integrates existing ones.

Challenge: Overcoming organizational and market muscle memory (sales comfortable selling known products, customers not rethinking company perception).
PMM’s Role: Resisting “mo’ product, mo’ better” focus, establishing a story framing the why for a suite of products, helping customers understand solution value over individual products, understanding GTM overlap/differences (especially for acquired products), and preparing the company and market for the transition.
Key Activities: Creating tools/training for GTM teams, activating influencer networks, ensuring thought leadership is discoverable, and evolving the company’s brand.
Impact: Proactive and coordinated PMM has outsized impact in this transition.

Moving from Product to Solution, Service, or Customer-Centric

Shifting from product-focused value propositions to service or customer-centric ones.

Example: Microsoft shifting from product-based editions (Office Standard/Pro) to customer segment-based subscriptions (Microsoft 365 for home/business), where value is constructed around the market segment and ongoing value, not individual products.
Packaging Value: This is fundamentally about framing and packaging value to improve adoption in desired markets, which is a core PMM strength.
Licensing: Tactics like multi-year enterprise licenses for unlimited access can accelerate adoption of new products (as seen with Microsoft).

International Expansion

Tailoring GTM tactics and messaging to local markets is crucial for international growth.

Distinct Markets: Markets in different geographies can be distinct and require tailored approaches (e.g., ABM being established in the US but lagging in Europe).
Local Teams: In-country GTM teams are essential for knowing how to adapt global strategies for local needs.
PMM’s Role: Acting as a powerful translation layer between in-country teams and HQ, representing local market needs to product and GTM teams for global decision-making, and communicating nonobvious marketing challenges (language, technology accessibility, cultural translation).

This chapter emphasizes that product marketing is uniquely positioned to drive transformation during mature company inflection points by strategically addressing market perception, overcoming inertia, and tailoring GTM approaches to new realities and business goals.

Conclusion What You Can Do Right Now

This conclusion summarizes the core message of the book and provides actionable steps individuals can take to improve product marketing regardless of their role or organizational structure.

Product Marketing’s Power

Effective product marketing, grounded in the four fundamentals, is powerful and capable of transforming business outcomes. The ideal is worth striving toward, even if not fully achieved immediately.

Four Fundamentals of Product Marketing

Recap of the core pillars:

Ambassador: Connecting customer and market insights.
Strategist: Directing the product’s go-to-market.
Storyteller: Shaping how the world thinks about the product.
Evangelist: Enabling others to tell the story.

Actionable Steps

Specific actions anyone can take to improve product marketing within their organization.

Request Market/Customer Point-of-View: Actively ask PMMs for their insights in product and GTM meetings.
Learn from Marketing Successes: Analyze successful marketing activities to identify market signals (audience, messages, features).
Share More Stories: Use real-person stories to bring product impact to life for internal teams, not just data.
Revisit Messaging: Assess current messaging using the CAST guidelines (Clear, Authentic, Simple, Tested) and seek improvement.
Use the PGTM Canvas: Implement this tool to align GTM teams and product around customer realities and strategies.
Use the Messaging Canvas: Use this tool to improve what marketing and sales say, ensuring consistency and translating product knowledge.
Use a Release Scale: Implement this tool to align product and marketing on release types and expectations.
Use Agile Marketing Practices: Encourage or implement weekly PMM-led marketing reviews to prioritize and adapt based on market learning.

This conclusion encourages readers to apply the four fundamentals and provided tools, emphasizing that every tech business can improve through better product marketing, and individuals can drive this change by rethinking assumptions and expecting more.